Ooer ... (Self Hating White Liberals)

I see from my stats (nothing like prodding Tim Ireland to up the hit count. But you still can't link to an individual post.) that those Googlistas in search of 'self hating white liberals' find this site in third (via an UAE search engine) and fourth position. Alas sandwiched in between Stormfront and someone with other unpleasant views.

Perhaps if I keep titling as above I'll dominate the top 10 and can eventually register a trade mark.

Traveller News

Tony Martin has according to the Daily Mirror taken to the roads, possibly drawn to the unlimited amount of legal aid available for 'the travelling community'.

The six solicitors of the Community Law Partnership have received £1.88m of taxpayers money in the last four years. They specialise in helping travellers whose human rights have been violated by straight society's racist expectation that they should obey planning laws. Cases are legally aided because, as everyone who lives in the sticks knows, travellers are very poor people who never know where to find any money.

Stoke Newington Nightmare

A most depressing story, about a kind of racism that doesn't officially exist. Because it doesn't exist, people can't complain about it, and good liberals like the writer can't even bring themselves to give it a name. They just move out.

Vaguely similar to this depressing piece, about some of the old people who can't afford to move. Don't agree with his conclusions, but he writes it how he sees it.

UPDATE - Vaguely similar in New York.

Jewish Conspiracy Part 29

LGF pick up on a UK teachers forum where a poster equates the 'tickling of feet' at Abu Ghraib with the mutilation of corpses.

I'm more interested in the posts of one of the system administrators, far-left historian John Simkin. Simkin dismisses the central theme of Fahrenheit 911 in an impressive post (post #15 in the thread).

"In his let's-join-up-all-the-dots way, this Emile Zola from Flint, Michigan, accuses Bush of a corrupt relationship with the Saudis. He says - or hints heavily - that Bush had business links with the Bin Laden family, which induced him to allow the lot of them to escape from the US on chartered planes in the aftermath of 9/11, and, secondly, to allow Osama himself to get away later, while Bush hastily diverted the public's attention to irrelevant Iraq.

There is only one source given for this material - a New York writer called Craig Unger who is interviewed on screen by Moore about it. Unger has written a book called House of Bush, House of Saud. Few Britons have yet had a chance to read it, because its first UK publishers, Random House, took fright at the prospect of being sued by rich Saudis. A smaller firm, Gibson Square, proved braver and Unger's book is due out this month.

Unger is not in the big league of historians. To quote his book jacket: "He has written about the two George Bushes for the New Yorker, Esquire and Vanity Fair". And his subtitle is downright false: The Secret Relationship Between the World's Two Most Powerful Dynasties. The relationship has not been a secret.

The text is solidly enough researched. It does indeed demonstrate convincingly that Bush had a business buddy called Jim Bath back in Houston, Texas, in the 1970s, who in turn acted as fixer and frontman for a pair of rich young Saudis. One of them was a brother of Osama bin Laden, and the other, years later, donated to Osama's Afghan guerrilla war against Soviet Russia.

The book does go on to show too that some Saudi money went into a struggling oil firm, Harken, in which the young Bush was involved. And it does show that the Bin Ladens and all the other rich Saudis holidaying in the US at the time of 9/11, were hustled home in an astonishingly privileged way, probably thanks to the cigar-chomping Prince Bandar, Saudi ambassador to Washington.

The book also documents two important general points. One is that the undeservedly wealthy Saudis have invested an estimated $860bn in US companies and purchased US arms worth several hundred billions of dollars.

The other key fact demonstrated is that the Saudi royals have helped preserve their close link with the US by aiding successive administrations in unsavoury plots and plans. These included arming the Nicaraguan contras, covertly arming Saddam in Iraq (in the days when it suited the US to encourage him), and using Saudi conduits to funnel money to the crazed Osama bin Laden himself (ditto).

Unlike Moore's film, the underlying Unger book is perfectly fastidious with the facts. But Unger's dots don't join up to make a conspiracy either.

For a start, they do not show that a Bin Laden directly funded Bush. For another thing, the Bin Ladens are a huge clan, and knowing a single one of them does not automatically tar you with the Osama bin Laden brush.

Most important of all, there is a fundamental misreading of the nature of the relationships at work here. Many western politicians in the 70s, 80s and 90s sought to shake down the Saudis and relieve them of their oil money, either to prop up their local economies or to line their personal pockets. Britain's own Tory cabinet minister Jonathan Aitken was a case in point, and ended up going to jail as a result.

Naturally, this required the turning of a blind eye to the alarming characteristics of Saudi society - for example, its brutality, corruption, despotism, misogyny, fanaticism, hypocrisy, dishonesty and greed. And equally naturally, it is very embarrassing for the likes of George Bush when the consequences of that sort of behaviour blow back in your face. Who would want to advertise it?

But this does not make a conspiracy. There is no real evidence in Unger's book that Bush wanted Osama bin Laden to escape, or that he invaded Iraq as a deliberate distraction.

In fact, the 9/11 commission last week blamed the defence department arch-hawk Paul Wolfowitz for the Iraq obsession, quoting the president telling Tony Blair that Iraq was not the immediate problem, whatever Wolfowitz said. And indeed, Moore's parochially-minded J'Accuse makes no mention of our own PM's equally loopy wish to march on Baghdad.

Moore's defenders say that, if not factually correct, then his film is in some way "essentially" true. Iraqi babies and US blue-collar soldiers are indeed being blown to bits for no good reason. The west's unholy relationship with Saudi Arabia and the Saudi royal family's unholy relationship in turn with its barbaric Islamists, did, in a general sense, lead to 9/11. And western politicians do seem to want to distract us from those nasty facts.

But this makes Fahrenheit 9/11, in documentary terms at least, a fraud. The film is not journalism. It is an extended piece of stand-up - a satiric riff by one deeply hostile individual. This shouldn't discourage people from going to this exhilarating movie. But it means that if you have a respect for accuracy, watching will be a guilty pleasure."

Good stuff given the author's politics. Unfortunately there's post #14, also by John Simkin.

"It was recently revealed (Robin Ramsay’s The Rise of New Labour) that when Blair became a candidate for the leadership of the Labour Party in 1994, Gideon Meir, a senior official at the Israeli Embassy in London, introduced him to Michael Levy (an extremely wealthy Jewish businessmen). Levy agreed to help Blair to become leader of the party. Levy, with the help of four other Jewish businessmen (Sir Emmanuel Kaye, Sir Trevor Chinn, Maurice Hatter, and David Goldman) provided Blair with £7m. This paid for his campaign plus the running of his private office. This money allowed Blair to become independent of Labour Party funding. Could it be this money, rather than the charm of George Bush, that persuaded Blair to give his support to the American (Israeli) policy in the Middle East. "

Those pesky Jews. I told you it was all about Israoil.

Simkin is the founder of spartacus, a left-wing history resource for schools that doesn't advertise itself as such.

The Education Forum which Mr Simkin administers is part of the National Grid For Learning - in other words it's funded by the UK taxpayer. It has a link at the top of every page to spartacus - but the only health warning is about advertising. How is spartacus funded, I wonder ?

I feel a conspiracy theory coming on, and it deepens when I see that George Monbiot also posts in the thread. Another thread is graced with contributions from the Guardian's Martin Jacques and Jackie Ashley (admittedly pastes of their Guardian work) as well as Mr Simkin and Labour MP Peter Kilfoyle.

I've got no objection to a left wing bulletin board - urban75 is one of my favourites.

But does it have to be funded by my taxes ? Do I have to cough up for a site administered by someone who thinks UK foreign policy was bought with Jewish gold ?



Hat-tip - Dumb Jon.

Congratulations ...

To Harry, Peter and those chosen by the BBC as top politics sites. And a particular shout to Stephen Lewis, whose Sterling Times was one of the first sites to link to the Tony Martin campaign. Not exactly a politics blog, but about "the eccentricities of British culture ... about old and vintage radio, television, music and literature ...about Englishness and patriotism."

Of course the BBC's plugging of Bloggerheads has nothing to do with his 'I believe in the BBC' campaign. I believe in them too - they definitely exist. Pity he doesn't believe in the War On Terror ("Boy, all of this 'current and specific' terror intelligence has come at a good time, hasn't it? Another thing it does is that is eases the minds of those who may just worry about piffling matter like human rights... ").

If Tim Ireland's a Web God why can't I link to individual posts ?

British Spin is suicidal.



While we're on the WOT and human rights, the recent arrests have (surprise surprise) provoked accusations of 'targeting' and 'Islamophobia'. Again.

It does seem wrong to target Muslims simply because most of the major terrorist attacks are carried out in the name of Allah nowadays. It must simply be an excuse for the police to give free rein to their hideous racism. God, we are SO evil.

Whereas as far as I know the BNP haven't complained about this.



PS - well strike a light. Michael 'Bowling For Columbine' Moore has armed bodyguards.

Java Goodies

Download these free (for non-commercial use) Java applets and make your website prettier. I don't think you can use them on blogger (correct me if I'm wrong) but they're still pretty neat. Small (the panorama viewer is 20K) but perfectly formed.

As used to make this.

A Policeman's Blog

How have I missed this blog ? How long's Mr Cuthbertson kept it in his sidebar without trumpeting it to the world ?

I should be cutting the hedges but it's compulsive reading. Corporate creeps, Asian youth who call you racist (bad), Iraqis and old people (good) - all human life is there as well as some sub-human (underclass or social workers) :-)

Riveting stuff.

A Few Late Snowdrops From The Curate's Garden ...

A while back I blogged on the parallels between the Gay Pride and Drumcree marches.

"The dispute centres on the desire by marchers to march along the mainly heterosexual Park Lane on their way back from Trafalgar Square, against residents' wishes."

I guess this had to happen sometime.



Elsewhere the Guardian is offended, as I am, by the decision to send Geoff Hoon to Gibraltar for the celebrations. Sending the man who is destroying the British Army will surely send the wrong signal to Madrid.

Apparently though, the Guardian thinks Mr Hoon is too militaristic and the Government is being "insensitive" by allowing a Minister to visit sovereign British territory. "Both sides agree on the aim of shared sovereignty", do they ? Latte drinking surrender monkeys.

Mr Hoon has a nice little earner lined up for the few remaining squaddies - it's Green Goddess time again.



If the Guardian's so environmentally sensitive, how come those annoying pop-ups on their site are all for cars ?



The death of Henri Cartier Bresson diminishes us all, as does the death of Dave Smith from Brierley Hill. But if I never see the kid with the bottles of wine or that couple kissing again it'll be too soon for me.



Lastly a mag I've not seen before - Freezerbox, a bit like an American Spiked. Lefty and cynical but intelligent. Neat stuff on Sudan, evolution, allsorts.

A Day Out

My small daughter is named after the old Welsh county of Merioneth, and has been pestering me for some time to take her on a tour of the place. So on Saturday we took the back roads to Lake Vyrnwy, before crossing over to the top of the Bwlch-y-Groes (Pass of the Cross), a steep and spectacular road.



We called in at Llanymawddwy Church, founded in the 6th century by St Tydecho.



Went to the beach at Barmouth.



And finally went searching for gold, with the aid of a tourist map showing gold mines and large scale OS maps showing nothing. On a tiny mountain road we stopped a farmer.

"Excuse me - are there any old gold mines near here ?"

"About fifteen on this mountain. There's a company been formed to look at the whole area."

I thought he might be winding up a lost Englishman, but he spoke truth. So a happy daughter filled the sandwich box with stream gravel and the car with rocks. We're still crushing them. And I see we really shouldn't have.

There's gold all over the place in the UK - only not much of it.

Finally home - a journey on empty roads through as yet unspoiled mid-Wales. We stopped on a hillside as the sun went down, finished the sandwiches and I took this 360-degree panorama. Got home at eleven.

It took me all this evening and half the night to get the panorama software to work, but that's another story.

Told You So

Way back in homogenous 20s and 30s England, when the exotic (but relatively tiny) immigrant quarters of London, with their Jews, Russians, Letts and seafaring communities provided colour for a generation of crime and adventure writers, from Dorothy L Sayers to Dornford Yates, the Jews were about the most exotic 'other' that existed ... A few things have happened since those days. The Jews, for the first time in millennia, have a homeland ... And now England has much more interesting 'others' - like the British Muslims.

This blog, December 2003.

Israel could no longer be regarded as a country made up of passive victims in need of the Guardian's liberal embrace ...
The "disenchantment" of the Guardian is largely due to the limits of its liberal philo-semitism once Jews could no longer be loved primarily for their victimhood. When it became clear, after 1967, that the creation of Israel had given rise to another set of victims, the Palestinians, Jews could no longer be unequivocally embraced.

Bayran Cheyette, reviewing Daphna Baram's book "Disenchantment: The Guardian and Israel" in the Guardian.

Covered at Backspin and Mark Fox - whose post implying that Daphna Baram thought the Guardian antisemitic is answered by Daphna herself. The Economist has a review which also takes apart the Glasgow Media Group ('It is pro-Israeli bias, for example, to use the word “terrorism” to describe the indiscriminate slaughter of civilians at bus stops').

Hat-Tip - Fisky, on form again.

Letters To The Editor

Dear Sir,

Today in the Guardian I saw the first 'Sudan - it's all about oil' article of the summer. Is this a record ?

Yours etc


PS - Crooked Timber (among others) saw it too.

Most Wanted

On the 24th September 2001 US Treasury Secretary O'Neill issued an Executive Order freezing the assets of named individuals and organisations suspected of funding or carrying out acts of terror. A second list followed in October 2001.

Among the names, Ahmed Ghailani, also known as 'Ahmed The Tanzanian' or 'Fupi', who was captured in Pakistan a week ago.

Many of the suspected terrorists were only known by nicknames or aliases - the first wanted list mentioned 'Abu Hafs The Mauritanian' and subsequent lists spoke of 'Ahmed The Egyptian' (imagine the Egyptians issuing a wanted notice for 'Dave From England') and 'Ernad The Palestinian'. Although among this latest list you can spot our old friend Abu Hamza, surprisingly not known as Captain Hook.

A lot of the early names were killed or captured. Abu Hafs The Mauritanian made it onto Robert Fisk's website, was then reported killed, but has since been reported to be in Iran. Ahmed The Egyptian still appears to be wanted, but the current top 20 has lost a fair few names.

Presumably the US authorities have good reason to issue warnings about attacks in New York. The jury's still out on whether his arrest lead to the attempted assassination of Shaukat Aziz, but this is a big Al Qaeda catch.

Where Is Richard Littlejohn ?

He's vanished from the Sun website. He's not answered my email (most unlike him). Has he been kidnapped by an organ of State power ? Is he being questioned in a Home Office basement ? I'll have to ask David Aaronovitch and see if he knows.

Or has he been exposed to some Kryptonite to create the uber-Littlejohn that is Barry Beelzebub ?

I have to thank Mr. Free Market for bringing Barry to my attention as I don't live close enough to Brissle to read the Evening Post.

BB on women in the workplace :

"This column you've just sent through. Have you any idea what it might do to us?"

I vaguely recall dispatching 1,000 words earlier that day musing on the position of women in the workplace. Surely this can't be the reason for the late night call?

Well, apparently it is. In fact, Mr Ed is so panicked by my entirely reasonable views that he's ordered the Evening Post's emergency stock of "skate-boarding dog" stories to be rushed out of storage to fill this space. Even the legendary "newborn baby who looks like Brunel" expose is put on stand-by. Even if he is 27 by now.

"I cannot carry a column arguing that women have no place in the workplace and should stay at home bringing up a family," continues the Buckfast and Vimto-crazed loon.

"We cannot say that they're mere opportunists who get pregnant as soon as they get a job and then leech off the company for years after.

"And if we do, every mercenary female in the building will be accusing me of leering at their baps by the water cooler, of failing to give them a pay rise for turning up on time for five continuous days, and before you know it we'll be up before an industrial tribunal forking out several thousand quid to a mad woman with a bad attitude, twins, women's troubles and bats living in her hair."

At this point, I make a burring noise and replace the receiver.



Just the titles of his other articles are enough :

"Tantric Sex and the Women's FA Cup"

"Should the poor be allowed to breed ?"

"Soap-dodgers, shirt-lifters, shirkers and social workers"

"Why don't Big Issue sellers dress better ?"

I hereby add Mr Beelzebub to the Commentators sidebar. He can just squeeze between Polly and Yasmin. No touching now, girls !

Multicultural News

Way back in May there was rioting over five nights in Peterborough, a story which strangely escaped BBC Radio News. The violence, between Pakistanis and Iraqi asylum seekers, was attributed by the police to 'cultural differences'.

The fair town of Peterborough held its Anand Mela festival last week, to celebrate the diverse cultures of the area.

You know what's coming.

Tales From Outsourcing Country

At the solicitors last year I was intrigued to learn that the letters they send me (each of which they charge £30-odd for) were typed up and formatted in India. The solicitor in Gloucester dictates the letter, an mp3 file is mailed to the processing centre along with a reference for my customer details, and within an hour a neatly laid out Word document is returned ready for printing.

There are now several such companies operating in the UK.

Via Fiskie, a lengthy and fascinating New Yorker piece on outsourcing from a variety of Indian perspectives - good and bad. It's mostly focused on the operations of Office Tiger.

Outsourcing, as I've noted before, is going higher up the corporate food chain.

"Office Tiger recently doubled its staff, to sixteen hundred and fifty workers, and will nearly double in size gain by year’s end, on the strength of “judgment-dependent services": equity analysis, legal research, and accounting jobs that pay an annual salary of up to a hundred thousand dollars in the United States and between ten and twenty per cent of that in Chennai."

Now I'm not a believer in the US being uniquely evil. Human nature (aka 'Original Sin') makes men and their companies greedy, and makes corrupt governments turn blind eyes. The article is mostly upbeat about the amazing transformations of Chennai and Bangalore - and the portrait of Harish Kumar is wonderful.

But I'm amazed I haven't seen this reprinted in the Guardian yet. Coca-Cola and Pepsi would appear to be operating here on the basis of 'what you can get away with'. Chennai, by the way, is the place an Englishman would know as Madras.

In front of the main local reservoir, there is a sign in Tamil that reads “No bathers and washers,” and this spring there were none. Instead, there were men, women, dogs, and Brahma cows walking across the reservoir’s bed, which had become an inter-village shortcut, and upon which wildflowers bloomed. Before Chennai’s hot season had even begun, water reserves were lower than they’d been in fifty years. Harish’s home, like most others, had little or no running water. Inoperative water pumps outside houses and apartments were covered with dust, and were attended by dry troughs for rainwater harvesting—a conservation technique mandated by the government three years ago, just as the drought began. Residents spent hours queuing for emergency water rations that tankers brought in from the hinterlands. In Triplicane pawnshops, fathers sold pieces of their daughters’ dowries to buy bottled water to give those daughters a drink and a wash. In nearby Poonamallee, where a century-old pond evaporated, hundreds of homeless turtles wandered onto a thoroughfare, where their search for an alternative water source ended badly.

The gods’ will, residents said of the drought. But to follow the water tankers out of the city in their search for a place to refill was to glimpse a human factor, too. In Chennai, as in most of India, groundwater is not a public good; it’s a private, barely regulated commodity. Thus, for decades, corporations and individuals have bored deep into fossil water, which is not replenishable—a pell-mell water mining that has left what remains as brackish as the sea. Some could afford to drill deeper than others. Just past a village where the price of watermelon had tripled and sheep had died of dehydration, there emerged the shining signage of two soft-drink bottling plants—Pepsi, first, then the bigger, glossier Coca-Cola, which sits on the greenest plot for miles around.

There is a Tamil proverb, “When someone suffers, offer water first.” Villagers say it with irony now. As the water tankers rattled farther and farther into the hills in search of unspoiled lakes, other trucks were rumbling back toward parched Chennai. Their flatbeds were stacked high with yellow-green bottles of Sprite, shimmering in the midday sun.

Play Vinyl With A Laser

Well there I was, googling for steel needles for the old wind-up gramophone Susan bought me a few years back - it's ages since I've heard 'Daddy Don't Go Down The Mine" or Dame Clara Butt.

When I found a site with a link to this. Wow.



But at $13,000 for the 78 rpm version I may have to wait till my birthday.

Law And Order

A cautionary tale from The England Project.

Meanwhile, back in the (sur)real world, a bully with plenty of previous gets 12 years for stabbing a 14 year old (Mr Cuthbertson is not amused), while the victim's mother asks why bad boys aren't excluded (we have that nice Mr Blunkett to thank for that) and the teachers ask for X-ray equipment and random weapons checks.

According to the Times, a quarter of boys take knives to school.

So the liberals are right, and society isn't getting more violent.

After all, at my excellent State grammar in the 1960s (now sunk to a dreadful comprehensive in special measures) probably between a third and a half of 5th-form boys (year 11) carried knives. Mostly penkives, but lock and flick-knives were prized. Out of school, Scouts and fishermen would wear a sheath knife on a belt - I still remember my 4-inch blade in its sheath with the Scout logo.

We played a game of 'splits' on the school field in which you'd hurl the knife into the ground near your opponent's feet - he'd have to move his foot to where the knife struck. The object was to get him in a position where he could just about stand but would then lose balance and topple slowly over - so towards the end you'd be throwing close to his foot - an inch or two maybe. He would also be throwing at you - you took turns to throw. Occasionally someone would get hit in the foot or leg, but school shoe leather was tough and the last thing you'd do was report any mishaps.

Though like any school we had our share of bullies and fights, the thought that anyone at school might stab someone never crossed my mind. It was literally unthinkable. Culture, anyone ?




If Mr Cuthbertson doesn't like 12 years for a stabbing, how about the same for slitting a baby's throat while it's strapped into a pushchair ? We have Straw and Blunkett to thank for the murderer being in England at all.

When he was charged the BBC, Guardian and Indie seemed a bit shy of mentioning his nationality or immigration status. Wonder how they'll cover it this time ?

UPDATE - they all seem to have lost their shyness ...

"This Is British Culture"

Sexually transmitted disease is up again. Can't imagine why.


Most of Birmingham is asleep, but here on Broad Street no one will go to bed for hours.

Despite the near-freezing temperature, people are dressed in astonishingly little. Women in mini-skirts, high heels, and halter tops shiver visibly, hugging their sides with cold. A girl staggers down the sidewalk on stiletto heels, bent over and clutching her stomach: She’s about to vomit.Another collapses entirely, and her friends howl with laughter as policemen stare impassively. The crowd, which is multiracial, ranges from white men with shaved heads to Bangladeshis with gold-capped teeth. People eat as they walk, dropping fast-food wrappers on the ground.The noise is unbelievable.

The throng includes the unlikely figure of Anthony Daniels, better known to readers of City Journal, the New Criterion, and the London Spectator by his pen name, Theodore Dalrymple. Stocky and balding, he has a wheezy laugh, a pugnacious mouth, and the devil-may-care smile of the born provocateur.

“If you can have ideological drunkenness, this is ideological drunkenness,” Mr. Daniels says, almost shouting to make himself heard.

“And what is the ideology?”

“The ideology is, ‘I’ve got a right to do whatever I like, and you’re not going to stop me.’”

Mr. Daniels has invited me to look at what’s going on not because it’s unusual, but because it’s commonplace, ordinary, and to be seen every weekend in urban centers all over the country. “This is British culture,” he says. “What you are now seeing is British culture.”

Portrait of the great man by the New York Sun. RTWT.

Marsh Arabs Latest ...

I wondered here and here if the marshes could be restored.

According to the Indie they're to be restored - by the UN. I'm not sure that fills me with confidence.

Link via (who else ?) Mirabilis.

Horror Stories For Children

Rachel Johnson in the Spectator bemoans the appalling children's books her daughters bring home.

"So when are you and Daddy getting divorced?’ is a question that mothers whose daughters are hooked on Jacqueline Wilson have become accustomed to hearing."

Ever since my son was given at school a Jacqueline Wilson featuring the child of separatedmumlivinginsquatwithradicalstreettheatre-runningboyfriend who finds Semtex lying about the place (an everyday story of what his Dad did in the Seventies) I've been suspicious of this woman, produced by mad Edinburgh geneticists (an early failure can be seen here) as a hybrid of Jenni Murray and Muriel Gray.




















PLUS



EQUALS





The boys stuff is worse. Gone are the days when the end of each chapter left Biggles and Co. facing some cliff-hanger. My eldest cuts straight to the chase with the collected works of Chris Ryan, and his younger brother has gone through the entire Darren Shan cycle, where the dilemma at the end of each chapter is who to kill next.


Now the youngest child, my seven year old daughter, a voracious and precocious reader who has polished off all the Harry Potters, has discovered some of the darkest stories imaginable, tales of hunger, cold, abandonment, death and magic. I have to read two or three to her every night. Even her elder brother listens.


She sat down, and bent her head low over the grave, as if she could see her child through the earth that covered him—her little boy, whose smile was so vividly before her, and the gentle expression of whose eyes, even on his sick-bed, she could not forget. How full of meaning that glance had been, as she leaned over him, holding in hers the pale hand which he had no longer strength to raise! As she had sat by his little cot, so now she sat by his grave; and here she could weep freely, and her tears fell upon it.

“Thou wouldst gladly go down and be with thy child,” said a voice quite close to her,—a voice that sounded so deep and clear, that it went to her heart.

She looked up, and by her side stood a man wrapped in a black cloak, with a hood closely drawn over his face; but her keen glance could distinguish the face under the hood. It was stern, yet awakened confidence, and the eyes beamed with youthful radiance.

“Down to my child,” she repeated; and tones of despair and entreaty sounded in the words.

“Darest thou to follow me?” asked the form. “I am Death.”

She bowed her head in token of assent.



She's discovered Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm in the Victorian original. Have a look in the remainder bookshop and you'll find cheap reprints of the original texts.

Child abuse, domestic violence, even anti-semitism - all the things young children see around them every day. Great stories, totally un-PC but full of wisdom - and written in a style which a Victorian, with a few years of village schooling, could take in her stride but which needs some (not too much) softening for todays State-educated child.




(The quote is from The Child In The Grave, a cheerful tale of bereavement. She seems to like that sort of stuff - The Little Match Girl is another favourite. What was it again about the Victorians idealising childhood ?)